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TO. ■- 

THE 

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY 



ADDRESS 

BY 



EDMUND J. JAMES, Ph. D., LL. D. 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL 

ASSOCIATION. AT CHICAGO, ILL., 

JULY 9, 1912 



PRESENTED BY MR. OLIVER 
August 19, 1912.— Ordered to be printed 



WASHINGTON 
1912 




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THE NATIONAL UNIVEESITY. 



By Edmund J. James, Ph. D., LL. D. 



Ladies and gentlemen: 

I have been asked to make an address upon the relation of the 
National Association of State University Presidents to the movement 
for the establishment of a national university. 

I desire to say in the first place that, apart from the facts which I 
shall give concerning the action of the association, I shall be pre- 
senting my own ideas. I believe they represent fairly well those 
of my colleagues in the association, and yet as they have not been 
presented to them for their criticism or endorsement, I wish it to be 
distinctly understood that I am speaking for nobody but myself in 
the argument which I shall present on this subject. 

After the fullest and most careful discussion of all phases of the 
subject the National Association of State University Presidents has 
rej)eatedly indorsed the project for the establishment of a national 
university. ' 

This means a university established by the Federal Government 
of the United States, deriving its support primarily from the Federal 
Treasury, subject to the ordinary control which a free government 
exercises over its organizat,ions and their work. 

I desire to lay down two or three propositions which seem to me 
fundamental in securing a proper position from which to judge this 
whole question. My first proposition is, that in a free state educa- 
tion is fundamentally a national function. I do not mean by this 
that it is necessary for the federal government of such a free state 
to regulate, control, or support education; though it may be desirable 
that it should do so. If the locality or the state or the two together, 
in a country like ours, will provide adequately for this national 
function, it may be properly enough left to them; but if they either 
do not or will not provide for it, then the federal government itself 
should undertake to see that provision is made. I mean, therefore, 
that education is a national function in the sense that it is of funda- 
mental importance to the Nation as a whole; that it should be properly 
performed and if there is no other way to secure its proper per- 
formance except through the cooperation of the Federal Govern- 
ment, then we should have this Qooperation. 

I maintain that in a State like ours education is a national function, 
because to the permanent endurance of a republic popular education 
is ah absolute necessity, and if it can not be obtained by one form of 
governmental organization, then it must be obtained by another, or 
the Nation will suffer the consequences. No free government can 

3 



4 THE NATIONAL UNIVEKSITY. 

long exist which is based upon an illiterate people — nay, I believe we 
may properly paraphrase Lincoln's great expression on another 
subject, that this Government can not remain permanently free if 
it is based upon a population half literate and half illiterate. All 
the people must become educated to the necessary extent to secure 
the basis for democratic government, or all will become uneducated, 
i. e., will fail to secure that degree of education necessary for the 
preservation of a free State. Now, to my mind, that is a national 
function in its nature, the adequate performance of which is essential 
to the existence of a nation. From this point of view education 
after the national defense is the most distinctly national function 
of all the functions which our society has to perform. 

But education is national in its nature from another point of view 
and should be recognized as such in the organization of our Govern- 
ment. The advantages given by elementary and secondary and 
higher schools are not limited to the communities which support 
them. A little red schoolhouse upon a lonely hillside of a New 
England State may train the man who will head a great movement 
for reform and progress in a distant State beyond the Rocky Moun- 
tains. The people of the latter State profit by the education which 
that man obtained at the expense of that New England district, and 
they should, by all standards of fairness, contribute their part toward 
the support of the school which produced hirn. In fact, I think it is 
too much to say that, taken broadly, the historv of this country 
during the last two generations will demonstrate that in many cases 
the chief advantage of the school system of a community has re- 
dounded to the benefit of other communities in which the particular 
boys and girls educated in these community schools have subse- 
quently spent their lives and done their work as members of society. 
Now, if all sections of the country profit by the existence of educa- 
tional advantages in any one community, then the country and the 
Nation as a whole should be expected to do its part in developing 
and supporting these local facilities for education. 

There is another reason why education is in its nature a national 
and not a local or State function, and that is that the disadvantages 
of the l ack j jf faci lities and the lack of schools are not limited to the 
communities which suffer such lack of school facilities to exisit. 
You hear a man say sometimes that it is up to the community to keep 
its school, and if it does not wish to keep one, let it suffer the conse- 
q^uences. But the same thing is true here as in the case just men- 
tioned, the evil results of inadequate school facilities do not accrue 
alone to the communities which neglect such matters, but are liable 
to be of the most serious consequence to other and distant communities, 
because under our scheme of life the ebb and flow of our population 
is so continuous and so extensive that the boys and girls who have 
missed the opportunity for the highest development, owing to the 
lack of these local facilities, become members of other communities 
and go into them and into their work weighted down with all the 
ignorance and apathy and indifference to higher things which is 
characteristic of an ignorant population as a whole. So that alike 
by the distributions of its advantages and the distributions of its dis- 
advantages, popular education is in its nature a national and not 
merely a State and local issue, a national function and not merely a 
State and local function, and consequently, unless the locality and 



THE NATIONAL UNIVEESITY. 5 

the State can and will perform this function satisfactorily, the Nation 
must come in as a unit and through its organized representative, the 
Federal Government, contribute its share in this way to the support 
of this common institution. 

We must not lose sight of the fact that it is after all the American 
people as a whole that pay the bills. It is not the Nation distinct, 
from the State or the State distinct from the locality, but it is the 
locality and the State taken in their totality which make up the 
Nation; and it is therefore a mere question of expediency through 
what organ and to what extent the people will exercise their power 
for the purpose of promoting the public welfare. 

Now, there is another important reason why the people of th<i 
United Sta,tes should aid the cause of education through their Fed- 
eral Government as well as through their State and local govern- 
ment, and that is that the people as a whole can do certain things 
through the cooperation of their Federal Government which they 
can not do through their State government or through their local 
government alone. The expense of an adequate educational system 
is enormous, and grows continually with the rising standard of the 
people as to what satisfactory education is. An adequate revenue 
system will draw upon national sources of revenue through the Fed- 
eral Government, upon State sources of revenue through the State, 
upon local sources of revenue through the local government. Some 
sources of wealth may be more easily and efficiently tapped through 
the Federal Government than through the State or local government, 
and vice versa. 

In our scheme of Federal Government in this country we handed 
over to the central authority a revenue power — I will not say more 
than adequate for the Federal purposes which we incorporated in our 
constitution, but I will say more adequate to accomplish the national 
ends contemplated in the law than were given either to the State or 
the locality. The Federal Government can raise funds in many 
respects more easily than either the State or the locality. And a 
sound financial system demands that that element in our system shall 
raise the revenue which it can raise most easily and then a reasonable 
distribution of the revenue so raised sh;all be made among the various 
Federal functions and among the State and local functions. 

I think our history has demonstrated clearly enough already that 
education can never be properly cared for in this country unless we 
draw upon national sources of revenue as a means of assisting in its 
support. 

Owing to history which I need not recount, the Southern States, for 
example, find themselves in the position of having two independent 
and complete systems of education, for the white and colored races, 
respectively. It is quite unreasonable to hope that in our day and 
generation the southern communities mil be wealthy enough, or, what 
amounts to the same thing for our purpose, will think they are wealthy 
enough to care adequately for these great interests, and if the people 
mil not utilize their other sources of revenue and their other organs 
of government to assist in providing a part of the means for the solu- 
tion of this problem, we shall still continue to suffer as we have suf- 
fered for generations by this situation. 
_ My next proposition is that this country can not solve its educa- 
tional problems in the large until it recognizes that education is the 



6 THE NATIONAL .UNIVERSITY- 

busjii6ss-^t th^^^tion and that pecuniary assistance for its support 
in a large way shall come through the organs of the Nation as a unit. 

We can not in fact get the money_ in any other way. We refer, of 
course, by preference in our educational discussions to the unhappy 
educational conditions of certain portions of the South. But the 
conditions are just as really and just as truly inadequate over whole 
sections of the Northern States as they are in the South. We need 
not go out of the State of Illinois itself to find schools which do not 
deserve that name. We need not go outside of Illinois to find local 
communities which, after taxing themselves to the limit which the 
law allows, still have not sufficient money to maintain during the 
months in which a child ought to be in school, the kind of school which 
it is worth the child's while to attend. 

There is another important matter which we ought not to lose sight 
of. Great national issues are pushed forward only when it is possible 
to secure national attention for them. Only when they have become 
national in a formal as well as an informal way. Only when the 
Nation is discussing them as great national issues. If we could get 
national attention concentrated upon our educational problems 
year after year as one of the fundamental issues, going to the very 
life of the Nation itself, we. should make vastly greater progress than 
we do. And this attention we shall get when we .recognize the 
essentially national character of education by making educational 
policy a part of national policy. When the Federal Congress dis- 
cusses educational questions as fully, as completely as they discuss 
questions of defense and the tariff and internal improvements, we 
shall be in a way of securing for educational issues that attention 
which is necessary to their continuous and rapid solution. 

Intimately connected with this fact, namely the necessity of secur- 
ing national attention for the consideration of national problems, if 
we wish to hasten their solution, is the further one that we could 
advance with far greater certainty and with far greater speed, our 
national standards, i. e., the standards of the people taken as a 
whole and in their local organizations, if we can get before the 
Nation as a whole a proper standard of what education means and 
what education ought to mean. 

The Nation, then, and not merely the local school district, or com- 
munity, or State, must become an educational unit in all grades of 
education. 

It has already become so to a certain extent. It is becoming so 
more and more with every passing day. Unequally, it is true, in 
spots only, here and there, but steadily and persistently. The 
Federal Government has granted lands for the support of elementary 
education in nearly all the States of the Union within whose territory 
were to be found large stretches of Government-owned land. In 
fact the Federal grants were the foundations of the school funds 
in the vast majority of the States of the Union. And out of these 
grants has proceeded the organization of a system or scheme of 
education in nearly three-fourths of the States of the Union. But 
the Federal Government has not been content with this. It began 
some 50 years ago the policy of developing within each State in the 
Union a higher institution of learning, supported in large part, first, 
by Federal grants of land; second, by the grants of money realized 
from the sale of land ; and, finally, by grants of money raised by the 



THE NATIONAL UNIVEESITY. 7 

general revenue system of the Government. And to-day we have 67 
such institutions which owe a part or the whole of their income to the 
action of the Federal Government. The aggregate value of the 
permanent funds and equipment of these land-grant colleges them- 
selves exceeds to-day $125,000,000. The total income of these 
institutions in 1910 was nearly $23,000,000. It would take an 
endowment fund of over $450,000,000 to produce this incom-e. 

We take pride here in Illinois in the fact that it was an Illinois 
farmer and professor who first formulated this plan, and that the 
Legislature of Illinois was the first American legislature to stand 
strongl}?^ behind this policy of Federal grants to higher education 
within the States. It has become the greatest scheme of an educa- 
tional endo-v^Tiient which the world has ever seen. The Federal Gov- 
ernment itself contributes only a small part of the total funds neces- 
sary for the support of these institutions, but it was the giving of that 
small- part which made the rest of it possible, which stimulated local 
and State interest, wliich, by fixing national standards, stimulated 
the nation to rise to these standards. I have very little doubt 
myself that if it had not been for the action of the Federal Govern- 
ment in making these appropriations for the development of agri- 
culture and the mechanic arts within the States, we should be a 
whole generation behind what we are in the development of our 
educational system. 

Incidentally I may say that the house of representatives of the 
Illinois Legislature has again led the way in urging upon the Federal 
Government the necessity of large additional grants for educational 
purposes by sending to Congress a unanimous petition, as follows: 

^\Qiereas the Legislature of Illinois, by the joint resokition of February eighth, eighteen 
hundred and fifty-three, was the first among the American legislatures to petition 
the Congress of the United States to make a grant of public land for each State in 
the Union for the liberal endowment of a system of industrial universities, one in 
each State, to promote the more liberal and practical education of our industrial 
classes and their teachers; and 
"WTbiereas the Congress not only made a liberal grant of land in the year eighteen hun- 
dred and sixty-two for this purpose, but has also followed up this policy once begun 
by still more liberal appropriations for the support of higher education in agriculture 
and the m_echanic arts, resulting in the great chain of colleges for agriculture and 
the mechanic arts to be found in every State and Territory in the Union; and 
Whereas the time has now come for the adoption of a similar policy in the field of 
elementary and secondary education; therefore, be it 

Resolved, by the House of Representatives of the State of Illinois, the Senate concurring 
herein. That the Congress of the United States be respectfully petitioned to appro- 
priate annually to each State and Territory in the Union a sum equal to one dollar 
per head of the population of said State or Teiritory as ascertained by the last census, 
for the purpose of establishing, maintaining, and extending in the elementary and 
secondary schools of said States and Territories, while not excluding other elementary 
and secondary subjects, such practical, industrial, and vocational training including 
agriculture, the mechanic arts, domestic science, manual training, commercial sub- 
jects, and such instruction in other similar subjects of practical nature as the interests 
of the community may seem to demand; and 

Rewlvedfurther, That oui Senators in Congress be instructed and our Representatives 
he requested to use their best exertions to produce the passage of a law of Congress 
donating said sum to each State and Territory in the Union f(3r said purpose: and 

Resolved further. That the governor of this State is hereby requested to forward a 
copy of the foregoing resolutions to our Senators and Representatives in Congress and 
to the executives and legislatures of each of the other States and Territories, inviting 
them to cooperate with us in this meritoriqus enterprise. 

I wish to emphasize again very strongly that national aid to educa- 
tion, whether lower or higher, does not necessarily mean excessive 



8 THE NATIONAL UNIVEKSITY. 

Federal centralization and control. The extent to which the Federal 
Government shall have control of the funds which it devotes to 
education is a matter of expediency to be settled from time to time 
and from generation to generation as national and local needs and 
possibilities may dictate. 

I should like to call attention to one other fact, and that is that 
the Federal Government, when it wished to develop by the expendi- 
tures of a comparatively small sum of money a system of educa- 
tional institutions which should have a profound effect upon the 
development of elementary and secondary education, it chose to 
establish colleges, not high schools; colleges, not grade schools; col- 
leges, not kindergartens. In other words, it recognized that in the 
development of an educational system in a country, progress goes 
often from the so-called higher to the lower. ' You can not develop 
a good high-school system unless you have a good college system 
which can supply the necessary teachers, the necessary guidance, 
the necessary stimulation, the necessary leadership. You can not 
have good grade schools unless you have good high schools which 
furnish, taken as a whole,, the training of the teachers employed in 
these elementary schools. The converse is of course equally true, 
that you can not develop your college beyond a certain low level of 
efficiency unless the high school can be brought up to a high level. 
Nor can you raise the level of your high school to what it ought to be 
unless the grade work is done properly. 

I desire again to call attention to the importance to educational 
advance of securing a national formulation, a national organization 
of the educational idea and educational ideal. 

There is a subtle moral and psychological reaction upon the people 
as a • whole arising from the formulation and incorporation of a 
national ideal in a practical national policy which spells progress and 
success for movements which are able to find such national expression. 

When, as suggested above, education is as regularly the subject of 
national debate and national conflict as the tariff, banking, and cur- 
rency, internal improvements, we shall take another long step forward 
in our educational development. 

What I have thus far said applies to all grades of education alike, 
and it is upon this foundation that in my advocacy of a national 
university I take my stand. If the views thus far advanced com- 
mand your assent, I believe I shall have your consent to the further 
proposition I advance, namely, that one of the essential elements of 
our American system of education is the kind of a university which 
the Federal Government can build and which shall stand, so to 
speak, at the apex of our educational pyramid, or if you choose to 
reverse the simile, it is all one to me — which shall be the foundation 
stone upon which the pyramid of national education shall be erected ; 
for all history shows that from the universities, from the highest 
schools have gone forth steadily those influences which have molded 
and shaped and fashioned the popular education in all times and in 
all countries. 

I mean by a national university an institution sufficiently like the 
ordinary institutions with which you are ail acquainted to be thor- 
oughly familiar to you. A teaching and training as well as an inves- 
tigating institution, manned with the best men in all departments in 
which the human intellect has exercised itself, drawn from the entire 



THE NATIONAL UNIVEESITY. 9 

world, equipped with all that money can provide, for the purpose of 
stimulating and increasing our interest in the world of the spirit and 
the world of sense about us. 

Now one of the fundamental purposes of a university system is to 
beget, diffuse, and establish, in the mind — nay, I will say also in the 
heart — of the people the scientitic spirit and the scientific method. 
If this can be accomplished, the face of the world will be changed. 
Now this can be done in certain respects more easily and more thor- 
oughly and more rapidly by means of a system of State and National 
universities than by any other means. 

In what I am about to say I am not animated by any spirit of 
opposition to the historic private institutions of this country. He 
would be an ungrateful American indeed who would cast any slur 
upon Harvard and Yale and Princeton, and the scores of more re- 
cently founded private universities, like Hopkins, Chicago, and Leland 
Stanford, and Northwestern, which are such an honor to our country 
and our civilization. I should certainly consider myself an ingrate 
if I should say anything derogatory of Harvard, or Pennsylvania, or 
Chicago, or Northwestern, where as a student or professor or presi- 
dent I had an opportunity to prepare myself for public service, and 
to have some small part in the glorious work of these institutions. 
All honor to them, and increasing power and glory and prosperity. 
But, friends, however great they may become — and may their shadow 
never grow less — they can never accomplish the pur-poses we have 
here in mind, namely, to incorporate in a visible form the national 
ideal of university education. 

I have long been a warm admirer of President Eliot, in many 
respects the greatest figure in American education. He was kind to 
me personally when I was a freshman at Harvard. He was for more 
than a generation my guide, philosopher, and friend in the field of 
university education and administration. I think it is not too much 
to saj^ that he revolutionized American higher education and revo- 
lutionized it to its great betterment. 

But I know no more striking illustration of the fundamental weak- 
ness that doth beset us all than President Eliot's notion that he 
could make of Harvard a national university in the sense that we 
have been using the term here; that he could make a private insti- 
tution, dependent for its resources upon the liberality and self- 
sacrifice or generous alumni, even though they should be still more 
liberal and more self-sacrificing, or upon the whims of rich men, even 
though they should be multiplied in number, situated upon the edge 
of the country, even in such a glorious city as Boston — that he could 
make an institution so located, and so fathered and mothered to be 
that embodiment of our national ideal of science and education and 
art which we are looking for. Other men have or have had the same 
notion for their institutions. Idle and vain hope. Neither Harvard 
nor Yale nor Columbia nor Princeton, nor all of them taken together, 
great as is their function, great as is their service, can hope to do. this 
particular service for this country. Nor Mr. Rockefeller nor Mr. 
Carnegie nor both of them together, though multiplied by five and 
animated as now by patriotic unselfishness and far-sighted motives, ■ 
can do this thing for the Nation, which after all only the Nation can 
do for itself. The State universities of Michigan and Wisconsin and 
Minnesota and Illinois and the forty others — no one of them alone 
S. Doc. 792, 62-2^ 2 



10 THE NATIONAL UNIVEKSITY. 

nor all of them together, great as they may become — and we are all 
headed for great things — can hope to fill this place, incorporating 
in themselves in such a way as to satisf^r the national longing, that 
deep felt, that unexpressed ideal of university education. 

The reason is simple. No partial expression will satisfj^ this long- 
ing for wholeness. When that which is perfect shall have come, that 
which is imperfect will unite with it and help constitute its perfection- 
private and State institution, with the national university, making one 
complete system — or it will dry up and disappear. When that which 
is complete shall have appeared, that which is incomplete must become 
a part of it or be sloughed off or cast into the scrap heap. No national 
university can exist except as the creation and organ of the national 
will, to be shaped and directed by it. Supported and sustained by 
this common will it will be the expression of you and me and all of us, 
we a part of it and it of us. 

Such an institution would not injure but benefit every private and 
every State university. By its superior support, by its superior 
prestige, by its greater wealth, it would strike the popular imagina- 
tion of this countr57^ in such a way as to give to the university idea 
itself an enormous impetus, the reflex effect of which would show 
itself in the increasing prosperity and development of every private 
and State institution. 

The foundation of Leland Stanford did not injure the University 
of California, but helped it immensely. The foundation of the 
University of Chicago did not injure Illinois or Northwestern or 
Michigan or Wisconsin, but by the bold and strildng way in which 
it raised high aloft the standard of science, and the magnificent way 
in which it followed this standard, it gave an impetus to the university 
idea which made the work of every one of these institutions more 
adequate and more easy. 

The same thing would be true in a larger degree of a national 
university, organized along proper lines, put under proper influence. 
A Such a national university as I have suggested, located at the site 
//of the Federal Government, supported by appropriations from the 
/Federal Treasury, controlled and regulated by Federal law, would 
I easily become, as it ought, the crowning institution of our university 
j system, private and State ahke. It could supplement the shortcom- 
i, ings of our other institutions as well as emphasize their excellencies. 
It could undertake many enterprises of national scope which no 
single institution, public or private, can afford to undertake. It 
could offer to our best qualified young men and young women oppor- 
tunities which only a nation like ours can afford to offer. 

Such an institution located in the national capital would exercise 

a vigorous and salutary influence on the course of Federal legislation 

\ itself. Its pointed spires and gilded domes would of themselves be 

powerful though mute monitors, calhng attention to the claims of 

science to be the guide of legislations. 

Such an institution located in the center of political power of the 
greatest nation on earth would attract in large numbers the bright 
. and promising youth of other countries, who as students here would 
imbibe those fundamental American ideas which we fondly believe 
are destined to work out the salvation of the world when they shall 
have done their perfect work, while these youth would gain added 
respect for our society and our ideals, which, carried back home and 



THE NATIONAL UNIVEESITY. 11 

incorporated in their own policies, would contribute powerfully to that 
mutual understanding which is the surest basis for international 
peace. 

Such an institution located in Washington could utihze for pur- 
poses of instruction and investigation the wonderful resources heaped 
up by the Government of the United States in its scientific depart- 
ments. The National Library, the museums and collections of all 
sorts he largely fallow at present, waiting for the people of the United 
States to make their utilization possible in the various schools and 
colleges of a national university. Such an institution located at such 
a strategic point will wield a subtle ever deepening and widening 
influence over the whole American people in the direction of increas- 
ing their interest and belief in science as an important element in 
private and national life. It will be their university, and they will 
come to take an increasing pride in and appreciation for the work 
it is doing, and thus will by this reflex effect be trained to gradually 
entertain an ever deeper respect for the standards and ideals of higher 
education itself. 

Friends, such an institution is coming, as surely and irresistibly as 
the tides of ocean. Will you help it or will 3^ou oppose it, or worse 
than either, will you do nothing ? 

This National Education Association could secure the establish- 
ment of this institution in a short time if it would only go after it in 
earnest. Ignorance and apathy and prejudice have thus far been 
most potent in preventing the realization of this dream of Washington. 

Private institutions, religious and secular, have opposed thus far 
successfully, the movement. Private individuals, men of wealth, 
men of no wealth, men of ideas, men of no ideas, have set them- 
selves against this project. It is up to you and the like of you to help 
bring this about in our day and generation. 

This great power can be set to work in the interests of science and 
art and education, supplementing, reenforcing our defective and 
weak system of education. Every day its coming is delayed repre- 
sents so much pure loss to the causes in which you are interested, to 
the welfare of this Nation, and to civilization in general by all that it 
might contribute if it were now at work. 

This institution, this national university, would be one of the most 
important elements in making this Nation of ours in reality what 
it is in our dreams and hopes and fond anticipations, the leader of the 
world in art, in science and education, and in civilization. 

o 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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